Reviewed by Marilyn B. Skinner, Department of Classics, University
of Arizona, mskinner@u.arizona.edu.

Word Count: 3,019.

In earlier decades, problems of weak or incongruous closure in Greek
and Latin texts were posed as questions of historical fact. Was the extant
ending of a given work original, or had additional lines been lost? Had
some hypothetical posthumous editor played havoc with the "natural,"
i.e., consecutive and climactic, sequence of an authorial collection? Given
the vagaries of manuscript survival, formulating closural issues in this
way appeared perfectly reasonable. However, contemporary literary theory
complicates empirical approaches to such difficulties by postulating that
notions of closure are themselves subject to interrogation from many
perspectives -- cultural,
psychological, political and metacritical, to name just four. All of those
perspectives are applied to classical material in this rich and thought-provoking
volume of critical essays.

In a 1989 article proleptically entitled "First Thoughts on
Closure",1 Don Fowler called the attention of
classical scholars to the complicated
discussions of conclusion and resolution in studies of modern literature
and urged his colleagues to attempt similar analyses of endings in ancient
texts. As their point of departure, a number of the essays in the present
collection take up suggestions for further work broached in that pioneering
study. Appropriately, then, Fowler leads off the volume with "Second
Thoughts on Closure" generated by revisiting certain of his earlier
assumptions.

Although he had previously argued for their simultaneous presence within
the text (1989: 79-82), Fowler now considers tendencies toward
closure or its opposite, semantic indeterminacy, to be epiphenomena of
the reader's response, as informed by personal temperament and ideological
bent. This shift in position prompts an insightful critique of current
critical discourses: "given a simple choice of being open or closed,
it is difficult for a twentieth-century person to choose to be closed"
(5). Citing recent debate over the Aristaeus and Orpheus episode in the
Georgics as his test case, Fowler proceeds to chide
"pessimistic" advocates of uncertainty for their unfair assumption
of a self-righteous stance: "the choice between a reading that stresses
unresolved ambiguities and one that tries to mediate and subsume them within
a higher resolution is not simply one between a good liberal openness and
anal-retentive boorishness" (6). A quick examination of conscience
on that point will no doubt do all of us progressive classicists good.

Fowler concedes that real linkages between closure and the imposition
of power underpin controversies over communal self-examination in Athenian
drama and over the epic teleology that plays itself out in the Aeneid
and its Silver Age successors. Yet, he adds, the basic binary opposition
between the closed and the open is still ripe for deconstruction. Clashes
between determinacy and indeterminacy in preexisting constructions of the
feminine subvert totalizing impressions of male hegemony over the voices
of female figures; even the familiar postmodern contrast between the "fixed"
sequential book text and the "openness" of its successors, hypertext
and cyberspace, oversimplifies the inherent complexity of both language
and the reading experience. The alternative to buying into these "big
myths of closure," as Fowler terms them, is an awareness that categories
of division are culture-based (13):

The way a culture segments reality will depend on two factors: the types
of boundary it recognizes, and above all its beginnings and endings, and
what one might term its segmental ontology, what sorts
of sort it acknowledges (not to mention, of course, its notions of "boundary"
and "sort").

A "cultural poetics of segmentation" will investigate such
factors as the hierarchical ranking of Roman social groups and the movement
of processions, funereal and triumphal, through time and space as clues
to broader and more abstract schemes of articulation.

Fowler concludes with observations on specific aspects of closure as
they emerge in recent criticism of classical texts: the "thematization"
of beginnings, endings, and middles as self-reflexive commentary; the widespread
application of mise-en-abyme as a critical trope, especially
in the form of internal narrators and authorial surrogates pronouncing
upon the larger narrative; the related perception of textual segments operating
as microcosms of the entire text and particularly as closural devices;
intertextual allusions at the beginnings of works to the endings of important
predecessors (e.g., the glance back to the end of the Argonautica
in the proem of Catullus 64); and instances of false or premature closure.
This catalogue of current protocols offers an extremely serviceable introduction
to the essays that follow his own.

If I've allotted so much space to Fowler's piece, it is not in order
to minimize the practical contributions of the chapters that follow, but
to underscore, instead, the decisive importance of his ongoing exploration
of the literary-critical topos of closure. In the process
of interrogating ancient and modern notions of completion, he makes astute
observations about numerous literary texts and raises searching questions
about the premises underlying currently popular methodological stances.
For the discipline as a whole, his is one of the most stimulating and potentially
valuable theoretical projects now in progress.

Several of the other essays in the volume classify the closural techniques
to be found in ancient genres and works. Rutherford's "Odes and Ends:
Closure in Greek Lyric" is (apart from the wretched pun) a commendable
example. Surviving lyric endings, though relatively small in number, nevertheless
display a wide repertoire of expedients. Five of those are singled out
for illustration: final prayers, frames and seals, reception by listeners,
gnomic reminders of limitation, and mythical exempla
or allusions. Pindar also uses anticipatory closural strategies, including
instances of false closure, internally, at the ends of triads; through
detailed treatments of O. 13 and N.
7, Rutherford shows the complexity of the artistic effect thus attained.
Following in the footsteps of Smith's monumental treatment of closure in
English verse,2 his typology, although much
briefer, is a crucial first
step in identifying and categorizing the characteristic terminal devices
of Greek and Roman poetry.

Similar typological surveys are attempted in Fusillo's "How Novels
End: Some Patterns of Closure in Ancient Narrative" and in Pelling's
"Is Death the End? Closure in Plutarch's Lives."
Fusillo makes the vital point that closural problems of fictional prose
texts differ from those of poetry and adopts a set of narratological categories
taken from Genette as tools of analysis. He notes the illusion of authenticity
achieved by the novelist's employment of paratextual devices and demonstrates,
through consideration of such issues as prognostic references to the future,
length of the closing scene, and the voice and perspective of the final
speaker, that the "happy ending" of the ancient novel is by no
means either purely consolatory or lacking in ambiguity. Pelling studies
examples of Plutarch's biographies that do not terminate with the death
of their protagonist in the light of the author's system of pairing and
then comparing lives. While the individual biography frequently ends with
posthumous material that offers a generous, or at least a long-range, perspective
upon moral issues surrounding the subject's actions, the synkrisis
or comparison reconsiders the question, often exposing it to closer scrutiny
and pronouncing a qualified judgment. Like Rutherford's, these surveys,
although more limited in scope because of their focus upon a single genre
or author, indicate that manipulating standard closural elements can create
unexpected final tension.

Special mention must be made here of Hardie's exemplary study "Closure
in Latin Epic." Breaking with the tendency to view epic as a rigidly
"closed" genre, he insists upon the uncertainties of its endings,
despite (or perhaps because of?) its implication in
prevailing ideological discourses. The classic instance of ambiguous closure
is, of course, the Aeneid, and Hardie establishes that
issues left unresolved there are taken up again in the ostensibly "rounded-off"
conclusions of the Thebaid and the Punica.
The outcome of Aeneas' struggle to found Rome, he argues, is displaced
from its proper narrative position at the end of the poem and only foreshadowed,
in passages such as the portrayal of Octavian's triumph on Aeneas' shield.
Structurally and thematically the last event depicted, the killing of Turnus,
does make meaningful sense of the whole, but it also "inverts the
expected sequence of violence followed by ritual" found in its Homeric
paradigms (144). Subsequently both Statius and Silius Italicus explore
the possibilities of "reopening stories that seem to have reached
a conclusion" (158) by reworking Vergilian matter. Hardie has put
his finger squarely upon the most disquieting closural element of the Aeneid,
the stark absence of ritual as a channel of mediation between slaughter
on the battlefield and the daily life of the community; and his readings
of the Thebiad and the Punica imply
that its omission cast a disturbing shadow over all post-Augustan epic.

No study of closure would be complete without mention of Ovid's Fasti,
the most notoriously incomplete of all classical texts. Barchiesi makes
an intriguing case for considering the break-off at 30 June a premeditated
gesture: withholding from circulation the last six books of the Fasti,
with their unavoidable focus upon imperial anniversaries, would, he argues,
epitomize the rupture in the poet's own life caused by exile and metaphorically
replicate the damage inflicted upon a poetic masterpiece originally consecrated
to the Princeps himself (et tibi sacratum sors mea rupit opus,
Tr. 2.552). Although more covert than the "overdetermined,"
all but parodic, closural strategies of the Metamorphoses,
the presence of terminal signs in the last forty lines of Fasti
6 raises the possibility that "[i]n two great projects, the Fasti
and the Metamorphoses, the act of ending offers the
reader a political analogy" (207). Similar explanations for the missing
second half of the Fasti have been proposed before,
of course, and even the perception of closural foreshadowings at, e.g.,
6.771-74 isn't entirely new. Still, Barchiesi assembles the impressive
(if not quite decisive) evidence for deliberate authorial suppression into
an elegant package.

Peta Fowler's "Lucretian Conclusions" demonstrates that awareness
of closural conventions can shed light on yet other long-standing philological
questions. By identifying signals of closure (particularly the epiphonema
or concluding gnome) in lines 1247-51 of DRN
6, she offers a new argument for Bockemueller's claim that this section
ought to be transposed to the very end of the poem. Endings of other Lucretian
books, similar conclusions in didactic poetry, epic, and tragedy, and putative
echoes in later works are also cited in support of this hypothesis. To
meet the objection that such a closing would be bleak and un-Epicurean,
she contends that the poem enacts both its "birth," by assimilating
itself to the creative principle in Book 1, and its subsequent "death"
and decomposition, thereby encapsulating its own vision of corporeal existence.
As it refuses to draw a firm moralizing conclusion, it sets a final test
for its internal reader, the Epicurean convert. Fowler's belief that an
ostensibly incomplete ending serves to lay the burden of resolution upon
the reader employs a set of assumptions much favored by fellow contributors.

Dewald's treatment of the concluding chapters of Herodotos' Histories
is probably the most suggestive use of the latter strategy. Having noted
that one dominant theme of the Histories is the limits
of genuine knowledge, which is "portrayed as hard to come by,"
and that "very few individuals in the narrative apply it usefully
to their own circumstances" (80), she proposes that these discrete
episodes look beyond the present to emerging patterns of history, barely
apparent to the author and his contemporaries and intelligible only to
subsequent generations. Similarly, Dunn unpacks the several premature "false
closures" of Euripides' Heracles to arrive at a
last moment of dubious indeterminacy in which the former champion must
comfort himself with ordinary human friendship and the spectators are left
with no narrative formulas and no divine, heroic, or civic values to help
them make sense of the catastrophe. Lastly, Murnaghan's somber study of
the Iliad shows how the narrative constantly defers
both the restoration of Achilles' lost honor and, for the armies as collective
bodies, an end to the murderous struggle for elusive glory. The ransoming
of Hector does not produce a moment of clarifying transcendence, because
Achilles, in her view, remains invested in the fallacy of individual distinction.
Hence "[t]he truce that is constructed by Achilles and Priam is, like
the other truces recorded in the Iliad, a temporary
pause that facilitates the continuation of the war -- the final
manifestation
of the pattern of incomplete closure that pervades the poem" (39).
Murnaghan's powerful reading reopens a scene and a plot whose implications
are perhaps too often presented as neatly, if tragically, settled.

Propertius' fourth book, which begins with a promise to sing of patriotic
themes -- immediately thereafter recanted -- and ends with a lofty
speech
of
self-justification by Cornelia, the dead wife of Paullus Aemelius Lepidus
(censor in 22 B.C.E.), poses an array of challenges for scholars attempting
to fix the poet's exact location on an "Augustan vs. anti-Augustan"
grid.3 In order to disprove the
"sincerity" (his word) of
the opening palinode and the other poems in Book 4, W. R. Johnson attempts
to uncover thoroughgoing irony in the last elegy. By hinting at buried
anxieties, he argues, Cornelia's mythic allusions find cracks in her ideological
convictions, while mention of the emperor's presence at her funeral in
the company of her mother Scribonia stirs up embarrassing old scandals
about Octavian's divorce of Scribonia and overhasty remarriage to Livia.
While Johnson's wit and ingenuity are always delightful, here, I'm afraid,
he doesn't make his case for a degree of irony sufficient to invalidate
all that has gone before. The closural aspects of the elegy seem to infuse
it with absolute determinacy: Cornelia takes her leave of Paullus convinced
of her future fame, proud of having met a demanding standard of excellence,
and speaking with the unimpeachable moral authority of the aristocratic
Roman mother.4 So, analogously, Propertius
may be taking leave of
his reader. To be sure, the latter account also oversimplifies, for the
intertextual layering of Cornelia's last words upon those of Cynthia in
4.7 is provocative, to say the least. Yet, given a basic groundnote of
finality, establishing the presence of unremitting bathos and ridicule
in this text appears particularly difficult. Nevertheless, by asking what
light the semantic operations of 4.11 as a closing poem
shed on the rest of the volume, Johnson has clearly launched an absorbing
new line of inquiry.

Many of these interpretations look to the "aftermath" in order
to open up the concluded text. Drawing the volume to a close, Roberts points
out the frequency of aftermaths in both modern and ancient narratives,
attributing them to desire for the full, complete stop afforded by the
character's death. Classical narratives, whose plots are drawn from a continuous
and familiar body of myth, may, at a point of apparent termination, prophesy
events still to come, obscurely hint at them, or even frankly refuse to
speak of them. Do these strategies defer the outcome or emphasize its inevitability?
Roberts proposes that such "double endings" not only force audiences
to view the text in two different ways but also underscore the uncertainty
of human happiness, a major concern of most ancient myths.

While an essay collection of this kind admittedly cannot pursue in depth
any of the large metacritical and epistemological issues implicated in
the study of closure, it can and does illustrate the great complexity of
ancient closural techniques and the variety of traditional philological
and historical problems upon which consideration of closure may shed light.
Further assistance to the novice scholar is provided in a short annotated
bibliography of earlier theoretical and practical research on the subject,
involving both modern and classical literature. I hope that Princeton will
soon issue this collection in paperback. It belongs on the reading list
of any graduate proseminar presuming to address the application of contemporary
theory to classical studies.

A postscript would seem to be in order. As a critical approach, closure
is most frequently invoked by this group of contributors to destabilize
a supposedly firm conclusion rather than to tie up a loose one. (Barchiesi
is an obvious exception.) Don Fowler is probably right in his assertion
that trained readers nowadays prefer the weak or indecisive ending. Smith's
breakthrough study assumes, however, that final integration and stability,
however artificially achieved, are the rule, irresolution and anti-closure
the marks of purposeful departure from the norm (see especially the section
"Closure and Anti-Closure in Modern Poetry," pp. 234-60). One
wonders, then, about the long-term outcomes of pursuing aperture for its
own sake. Are we happily prying open fissures so that a later generation
of scholars can have the satisfaction of nailing them shut again?

NOTES

2. B. H. Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of
How Poems End.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

3. E.g., H.-P. Stahl, Propertius:
"Love" and "War."
Individual and State under Augustus. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London: University of California Press, 1985: 248-305. For difficulties
inherent in the "grid" itself, see D. F. Kennedy's critique of
Stahl in The Arts of Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993: 35-37.

4. And possibly not just any Roman mother, but
the speaker's namesake,
the sainted Cornelia mater Gracchorum. In a paper currently
in progress, J. Hallett enumerates stylistic and thematic parallels between
Propertius' text and two fragments of a letter ascribed to the earlier
Cornelia preserved in manuscripts of Cornelius Nepos. These fragments are,
in any case, the most proper comparanda for Propertius
4.11. Even if they are forgeries, they nonetheless reflect the attitudes,
values, and comportment considered appropriate for such a cultural icon.